Ratchet's Fiery Madness
by Coleiosis
Summary: What's this? Ratchet is turning to crime and is now a new killer in town? This means that the U.S. Government was right! And Needles is amused at Ratchet's new hobby. But is this really the Ratchet that we all know and love? Rated T for mild violence, scary situations, and blood


PlayStation All-Stars: Breaking Reckoning

Part Four: Ratchet's Fiery Madness

By Cole Bezotte

That same night when Ratchet was lying there on his bed after the intense Twisted Metal competition of 2015, he felt more uneasy than ever. As he lied there on his bed, he kept on thinking: "Something's got to happen… something's got to happen…" But he still felt very ill after the giant ordeal with the competition, causing a nightmare to occur inside his head.

He began to dream about the time when the real Marcus Kane (Sweet Tooth) won the Twisted Metal contest and asked for the paper bag as his prize. As he sped into Calypso's underground garage, he spotted him surrounded by bodyguards and seated on a throne of broken car parts. His face was burnt beyond recognition. His smile was hideous. He spoke: "Congratulations! You have won my contest! Welcome to my home!"

As Marcus sat there in his car, his patience became very short. He was waiting for the paper bag that he claimed as his best friend. Calypso continued speaking: "As you know, Mr. Kane, I shall now grant any prize you request."

Marcus spoke up in a rather crazy attitude: "You just don't know! You don't know what it was like for me! It's just that I… and you… and them… YOU DON'T KNOW!"

"Look, I'm a little confused," Calypso replied. "For winning my Twisted Metal tournament, you may ask for anything as your prize. Anything costly, anything valuable, no matter the consequences. But instead, you ask me for THIS?!" With that, Calypso held up the crumpled-up paper bag in his hands.

"Oh man!" Marcus said after seeing that. "Give me that! GIMMIE!"

"A paper bag?! You can't be serious! I can offer you ANYTHING, Sweet Tooth! Money, fame, even POWER! You dare insult me?!"

But Marcus' mind was made up. He still begged for the bag to be retrieved to him. Once one of the guards gave it to him, he snatched it away and shouted at the guard: "Down! DOWN! YOU GET DOWN TO THE STREETS!" Plunging one hand into the bag and setting his other hand on the wheel, he looked at the bag and started speaking aloud again: "You… you said it would be easy! DO YOU KNOW WHAT THEY DID!? DO YOU!? YOU… Now it's MY turn! It's my world! It's my word! It's my turn! IT'S MY DAY!"

After that, those words rang in Ratchet's head. They kept on repeating themselves on and on over and over again. "IT'S MY DAY! IT'S MY DAY! IT'S MY DAY!"

"MY DAY TO WHAT?!" Ratchet kept on asking himself. This was certainly a trick Calypso brought up after winning the Twisted Metal competition. The potion that Calypso gave him was indeed cranberry-flavored, but the effects were something that no man has ever encountered before. It was a potion created to transform Ratchet into the most deadly beast that no human has ever seen before.

Before long, Ratchet soon began to undergo the most fantastic change ever. He watched as his body began to grow into something more hideous and threatening. But the worst part was his head; it felt like it was drenched in liquid fire as something began to overcome his mind. His teeth became razor-sharp fangs, and his face became as pale-white as a sheet. His head became engulfed in the most powerful flames of fire. Now the transformation was complete; he was now something murderous!

"Funny," Ratchet thought to himself suddenly. "There now seems to be a word that I enjoy saying to myself; and that word is MONSTER! HAHAHAHAHAHAH!" Evilly, he jumped off his bed, bashed out the door of the house, and started running through the streets, killing whatsoever he has in sight. "NOTHING CAN STOP ME NOW!" Ratchet, one of the last Lombaxes in the galaxy, was now a killer just like Needles.

Meanwhile, down in the Underworld, Calypso sat in a seat and drank tea while witnessing Ratchet destroying whatsoever he points at. "The potion worked," Calypso thought to himself. "Now he is a mindless killer like Sweet Tooth once had been. That was a pretty nifty trick that I pulled on him. Nothing ever went back to normal; I want Ratchet to remain a threat, because he deserves it! I'm purely evil, just as Ratchet is now! But the potion has a limit: once daytime comes, the potion will wear off. But when nightfall strikes, Ratchet will again become a monster! Oh how I love to see this!"

But Calypso was not the only one who saw all this. Deep into the city, Needles and Club Kid were on a building's rooftop, looking down at the damage Ratchet had done to the city. "This is impossible!" Needles exclaimed. "He's become just as bad as I am! How surprising! He's like a Lombax-version of ME!" It was true; Ratchet was doing exactly what Needles would do when it came to murdering people. He was running through the town, shouting: "Shut up and bleed!" to his hopeless victims.

"I've never had this good of entertainment in months!" Needles continued, waving a clown hat around. He had recently sewn himself a new outfit: an orange suit with tails and pink polka-dots, a pair of yellow pants with red stripes, a red hat with an orange line around it, classic black-and-white shoes, and a cane. His face was not like the mask that he forced Marcus Kane to carve; he had actual white makeup on his face with a red clown nose. He styled his orange-and-red hair to stick up (like Needles Kane's design in "Twisted Metal III").

"Perhaps if Ratchet can team up with me, we'll be known as the 'Diabolical Death Duo!' It has a pretty good ring to it!" He smiled again at his evil plan.

"But are we going to create this new city or what?!" Club Kid replied.

"All in good time, Club Kid. All in good time," Needles said as he pulled a blueprint out of his suit. It was the blueprint of the new Twisted City that he and Club Kid had been planning together.

Meanwhile, Ratchet was still torturing helpless, innocent victims and slaying them all over the city. "Run!" he exclaimed out loud. "All of you run! You are all no match for me! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!" But his moment of evil soon came to an end; he then saw the sun rise up into the sky, brightening the scenery. Ratchet then felt very strange as the flames on his head died out, and he was no longer pale. His body shrunk down to normal size, and he was no longer a monster.

Ratchet looked around the city and saw all the damage that he had caused. He saw many people desperately flee in panic and shouting: "RUN! HE'S A MONSTER!"

"What happened?!" Ratchet thought to himself. "I don't remember anything about after I won that Twisted Metal tournament. I must have been dreaming after I fell asleep. It's like a fading nightmare." He looked down and saw how torn his clothes were and saw blood scraped across a machete that he held. "What is this?! Why does it look like I'm trying to kill myself?!"

But Ratchet then heard some voices speak above him. It was Needles and Club Kid discussing about their new city, but also about Ratchet's doing. "How ironic," Ratchet heard Needles speak up. "This is like a modern case of Dr. Jekkel and Mr. Hyde! With all that damage that he had done to the city, there will be no other place to hide now! The whole U.S. Government will be looking for him and will soon put him under custody. But if there are still people who claim him as innocent, I'd like to see him get hanged by the government."

"You know what I'm thinking?" Club Kid replied. "Perhaps it would be better if Ratchet could stay as an evil killer and destroy the entire population of Earth! It would be better if the only inhabitants of Earth would be evil clowns that we would CREATE!"

"We shall see. Although, it is morning right now; once night falls again, he'll go back to being his evil self again. But once the sunrise starts shining in, he'll become that soft-hearted hero wannabe again. He'll probably realize that he's the monster by now."

"I don't know exactly. Even if he DID find out, he would perform a little 'suicide surgery' on himself and end his pitiful and miserable life once and for all. He would be erased from all existence forever!"

After hearing all this, Ratchet's heart thumped with anxiety and fear. He looked at the city's damage again and finally realized what was going on. "They're talking about me," he thought to himself aloud. "I must the one who's causing all this! I must get help!" With that, he took off to the main house to find what clues Needles could be leaving behind. He burst through the front door, only to find that nobody was present at the time. Everyone else was upstairs; Ratchet tried hearing what they all were talking about up there, but he could not hear anything clearly. "Whatever they're talking about," he thought to himself, "I hope it's not about ME."

But that did not mean that he was innocent. He then caught sight of a newspaper sitting on the dining room table. He went over to it and took a good look at the headline printed on it: "Ratchet Strikes Again!" Ratchet picked up the paper and started reading the heart-breaking, gut-wrenching truth. The paper read:

"The Los Angeles Health Department had received a very shocking moment when Ratchet had shot an innocent patient named Sasha Phyronix. Agent Shepard rushed quickly to the scene to find that Ratchet was indeed holding a pistol that still had smoke billowing out of it. The evidence was right there out in the open; there was no use denying the fact that Ratchet had shot his own girlfriend. Agent Shepard of the U.S. Government says that right after he caught Ratchet in his act, the once-good hero bashed out a nearby window to escape. 'I say that Ratchet is indeed a monster, and he must be stopped,' quotes Agent Shepard. 'If he is indeed the threat that Agent Stone had discovered years ago, then our worst fears have come true. The rumors are true; there's no use denying it.' Now soldiers from the U.S. Army and the government are out on the lookout for this dangerous creature, willing to hunt him down and destroy him."

Ratchet crumpled up the newspaper and tore it to shreds. He was sick and tired of all these accusations that the U.S. Government kept throwing at him. "That does it!" Ratchet exclaimed out loud. "I'm tired of what Agent Shepard keeps gossiping to the people of this planet! Just because I'm a Lombax, they see me as a threat! Now I'm worried that Shepard will soon warn the world about all the other aliens that came here! They might hunt down Angela… or maybe Sasha's father! I've got to do something fast! I'll go next-door and warn Angela of what's going on!"

With that, Ratchet quickly ran out of the house and headed down to the next house in the neighborhood. Once he made it, he quickly knocked on the door and shouted: "Angela! Pupuru! Someone let me in! PLEASE!" But there was no response. Even when looking through the windows, he saw that nobody was in there. "What shall I do now?!" he thought aloud. "I'm done for!"

"You're darn right!" Ratchet heard a familiar-sounding voice speak behind him. "Now turn around and face me! Look at me, Ratchet! I will be the last person that you'll ever know right before I execute you!"

Ratchet turned and saw that Agent Shepard was standing right there in front of him, holding a pistol and pointing straight forwards. "You're coming with me, monster!" he spoke up again. Right behind him was his car the Crimson Fury, with Preacher and Agent Stone sitting inside.

"I'm telling you, mister!" Ratchet replied. "You've got it all wrong! I'm not the one whom you're looking for!"

"That's what YOU think! Now get in the car before my hammer can click and shoot out a shell right at you!"

Ratchet stood there for a while, refusing to follow Agent Shepard's order. Instead, he made a sprinting run out of the neighborhood and throughout the streets. "AFTER HIM!" Preacher exclaimed as Agent Shepard hopped back into his car. He took off, following Ratchet through the streets of Los Angeles.

Needles and Club Kid still stood on the rooftop of one of the buildings. They witnessed how pathetic Ratchet was acting as the Crimson Fury followed on his trail. "Oh how I love to see Ratchet trapped in a case like this," Needles spoke up. "This is definitely the end of him!"

But things were not going so well for him and Club Kid anymore. Pretty soon, they heard footsteps of a man coming upstairs onto the rooftop. They turned to see Gigadis standing right in front of them. Gigadis wore a strange-looking hat that held a swirling circle on it. "You again!?" Club Kid spoke up. "What do you want!?"

"I came to get what I deserve," Gigadis replied. "Give me your blueprints now!"

"Forget it, stupid!" Needles said. "We're not taking orders from you!"

"Not unless you look into my eyes," Gigadis said as he brought his hat closer for the two clowny ones to see. They looked deep into it as the swirl started spinning around, capturing the sight of their eyes. "That's it now!" Gigadis continued. "Look deep into my eyes! Don't look away! Keep watching!" Before long, Needles and Club Kid stood there motionless. They were now spellbound, under the command of Gigadis.

"Thank you for cooperating with me," Gigadis continued. "Now you must obey me. Go and create my new kingdom! I will go and give my friend Primeval HIS instruction as well. Things are now starting to finally fall into place for me!"

Meanwhile, the Crimson Fury sprinted throughout the streets of Los Angeles, pursuing the hopeless Lombax as he almost staggers in his footing. Right when Agent Shepard took a sharp right turn (not noticing the rooftop above him where Gigadis was), he saw that Ratchet was now straight ahead from him. "Now I have him in my range!" the agent spoke up. "Nothing can stop him now! It will only take me one shot to bring him down!" With that, he shot out his special weapon, aiming directly for Ratchet.

Ratchet did not notice the deadly missile coming straight at him; within seconds, he was shot in the back with a very painful experience. Crowds watched as Ratchet got hit by the deadly weapon, also seeing him scream very loudly from the pain that engulfed his entire body. It caused him to stumble onto the ground, allowing Agent Shepard to stop his car and come out with his handcuffs. "I may have only burnt your back," he spoke up, "but there will be pain far worse coming soon for you! You're coming with me!"

With that, Agent Shepard threw Ratchet into his car and sped off to the prison building in which Needles at first used to hold Nathan Drake (as you have already read in our very first adventure). Ratchet did not want to go back there, not after already experiencing what it was like being held as a prisoner. Well, he was going to have to face this stuff again.

"It's a good thing we took this building back after all of Sweet Tooth's prisoners were set free," Agent Stone spoke up as the car settled into a parking spot. "That weird skeleton knight was generous enough to give us back this place."

"He was trying to save me," Ratchet hissed in reply as he sat in the backseat with Preacher. "You don't know a thing about what my friends want with me!"

"You have the right to remain silent!" Agent Stone snapped at him.

Once they got out of the car, the two agents showed Ratchet what he did to the barbed-wire-fence in order to get in and free Nathan (as you have also read; Ratchet used that big weapon of his to destroy that fence). "There will be no more such use of weapons like the ones you use," Stone continued. "If you were liable enough to destroy that fence, then you would be liable enough to blast through an innocent victim with a laser. Follow me!"

As Ratchet was being taken through the hall once they got inside, he right away recognized exactly which door belonged to which room. The one he was being taken to right now was the office that Needles and Sir Daniel had as their lair. Once inside, Ratchet saw that Commander Mason was at the desk, with the giant stash of money still piled on it. Mason's face went pale as he saw Ratchet standing there in front of him, with hands chained.

"My dear boy!" Mason exclaimed in fear. "They brought YOU in here! Why!?"

"You know the deal, Mason," Agent Shepard came in. "This is the alien that both you AND Stone had been talking about! But what's with the money on the desk!?"

"Sir Daniel Fortesque thought that this money could be useful to donate to the Los Angeles Apple Orphanage," Mason replied. "But we are not here to talk about that. I say you are making a big mistake! It can't be Ratchet's fault that all this chaos is going on in this city!"

"But you saw what he did, commander!" Agent Stone came in. "He slaughtered all those people out there early this morning! He deserves to be put in something like this! Tomorrow, we shall set up a pole and rope for him to be hanged!"

"But you can't do this to him!" Mason exclaimed. "It's not his fault!"

"I really do disagree with you, commander! But I cannot arrest you too because we are both part of the U.S. Government. I respect you as a part of the government."

"I respect you as a part of the government too. But I have an objection to your idea! Ratchet cannot be responsible for this!"

"Forget it, Mason!" Shepard interrupted. "A deal's a deal! We're keeping Ratchet in his prison cell until tomorrow!" With that, he and Stone took off to the prison cell, taking Ratchet to his doom.

"There must be some way for me to free Ratchet from the terror that will soon come to him," Mason thought aloud. "I highly doubt that Shepard will allow me to pay this money to free Ratchet. If words won't be the thing that will bring Ratchet out of this nightmare, I guess I'll have to free him myself! And I'll do it unexpectedly!"

**NEXT TIME: "PLAYSTATION ALL-STARS: GOVERNMENT TAKES OVER!"**


End file.
